by Aria Noble
The trolley pulled up to a corner immediately in front of the square, and Maudie started toward the front door of the vehicle, once again gesturing for Ember and Eli to follow her. They did, and a few moments later, they’d joined the mild throng of people spilling into the square.
The sky was brightening with the approach of sunrise, the clouds, and even the sky itself, turning an unreal shade of purple in the dawn. Ember found herself staring at those clouds. She’d never seen anything like that color for a sunrise, and her mind struggled with it for a moment until she realized that the clouds weren’t actually purple: they were red, and the blue tint of the force field between the clouds made them appear unnaturally purple.
Eli paused at the Atalanta statue as they passed it. He pressed his fingers to his lips and then to the statue’s feet, then spun back toward the palace and hurried to catch back up. “I haven’t worshiped properly in a week,” he muttered, though Ember wasn’t sure if the words were for her or not.
“I’m sure she understands,” Ember said back. After all, Atalanta was an explorer — there weren’t many people quite as keen to follow her example as Eli.
“Still, as my mother used to say—”
“That’s no excuse,” she quoted with him.
“Exactly.” He smiled like a grimace of guilt.
“We’ll be back this way, I’m sure,” Ember whispered. She didn’t like that Eli felt guilty over having not paid tribute to the mythical person who may or may not have actually existed. “We’ll make sure to stop once we’re not on a schedule.” She glanced meaningfully at Maudie’s back; the other woman had nearly broken into a jog, and the gestures she’d made the last couple of minutes for her charges to follow had become increasingly hurried and desperate. “I think right now, we’d better keep up with our escort.”
The front doors of the palace were separated from the square by a large chasm dug out of the ground and spanned by bridge made of the same kind of thick bluish glass of the wall on the east edge of the city. It was barely wide enough for two people to cross abreast. The number of people filing toward the palace now was significantly less than when she’d seen the place yesterday afternoon, but there were still enough people on the bridge that Ember wondered how it didn’t crack and drop them into the crack in the ground. She glanced over the railing that ran the entire length of the bridge. The chasm they hurried over wasn’t the biggest crack in the ground she’d ever seen — there was one not far from the walls of Dusk that ran from the top of its medium-sized glacier and fell for several hundred feet to the bottom. She’d once let Eli convince her to go there with him and even poked around the top of it, clinging to the sheer walls of ice around her with nothing but a pick and a short length of rope to keep her from falling in. This crack wasn’t nearly as deep as that, nor as treacherous-looking on the sides; if she were to fall, she felt fairly certain that she’d be able to climb out with only the soft cloth boots that had come with her pile of Frost woman clothing.
Still, walking across such a place on a strip of glass felt like an unwise thing to risk. Even if she could climb out of the crack, the impact of the ground from the actual fall might very well kill her before she had a chance to test whether or not she could climb back out again.
Ember hurried across the bridge, grateful to see when she glanced over at Eli that he seemed to feel some of the same anxiety on the crossing.
Maudie had finally paused on the other side of the bridge. Her smile must’ve slipped some while she was walking because she had to readjust and smear it back on when Ember and Eli caught up to her. “All right?”
Ember nodded. Eli didn’t answer; his attention seemed to have switched from the glass bridge to the palace and the huge sheer cliff of the mountain behind it.
“I’m so glad I don’t have to cross that bridge often, thanks be to the queen,” Maudie muttered conspiratorially. “Though if I worked at the palace, I would grow accustomed, of course.”
“Of course,” Ember echoed when Maudie paused for confirmation.
“Follow me, if you please. The sun will be up any minute.” She turned toward the front door.
Two men dressed in white pants and white coats and each holding a long, thin spear flanked the large front doors of the palace. One gestured with his spear for Maudie to stop as they approached — not exactly pointing it at her, but moving it as though he was considering pointing it at her. “State your name and your business,” he said. His voice was deep and gravelly; Ember wondered if he’d been chosen to guard the front doors for the intimidating sound of his voice alone, seeing as the rest of him was far less impressive. He was taller than she was, but that was hardly difficult — Eli could meet his eyes without having to look up — and weedier than most of the other Frost men she’d seen. He seemed to have trouble controlling the end of his spear.
Maudie straightened. “I’m Maudie, and I’ve brought our visitors to pay tribute to our queen.”
The guards looked Ember, and then Eli, from the tops of their head to the bottoms of their feet, then the one who’d spoken nodded and pulled back his spear. “Proceed.”
The quiet one pulled open the door for them, and Maudie stepped in and waved Ember and Eli after her. The door closed behind them with a dull, echoing thud.
Chapter Eleven
They were in a large hallway, faintly blue like the force field and smooth as glass. The inside was colder than it had been outside, a chill that seemed to radiate from the walls and floors itself. Ember reached out and brushed the wall with her fingers; they came away cold and very slightly damp.
So there was something in this city that was built with ice — but it was ice without flaws or marks from where blocks had been stacked or tools had been used.
People moved through the hall, stepping carefully to keep from slipping in their insufficient cloth shoes whenever they weren’t hurrying across the long white rug that covered the center of the hallway. They kept their voices low if they needed to speak, or just continued silently on when they didn’t. None of them seemed particularly interested in their visitors.
Maudie gestured again for Ember and Eli to follow her, and the three of them hurried down the hall, keeping to the center rug for traction. At the end of the hall was a door, which Maudie knocked on. “Come,” said a female voice from the other side of the door.
Ember suspected that this was the room where the queen was, and considering the way the queen made such an effort to intimidate anyone who came through her front doors, she was preparing to see something spectacular. She remembered the stories she’d been told when she was a child, old tales of queens and spirits and heroics. The queens of those tales — when there were queens in them — were grand and regal.
Ember didn’t believe in magic, but from everything she’d seen, it was a disbelief that was becoming increasingly difficult to hold onto.
What she saw when Maudie opened the door was not what she expected.
It was a room. Not even a particularly large room — bigger than any room she’d seen in Dusk, but not much bigger than their apartment. The flawless blue ice of the hallway ended at the door; the room was made of white boards and large but worn-thin rugs. At the far side of the room was a wide wooden desk, and behind the desk was a woman.
The woman — Ember presumed this was the queen — was middle-aged, dark-haired, and dressed like any one of the hundreds of women outside of her front doors. Ember wondered if Frost women dressed like her to emulate her or if she dressed like them in order to seem more personable. Her skin was so pale Ember could see the network of faint blue veins running across her neck and jaw, and she emphasized that faint blue tinge with lips and eyes painted to match the color of the ice outside her door. She stood up from behind the desk as Maudie ushered the visitors into the room. “Ah, our young Dusk friends,” she said, moving around the desk and approaching the center of the room, one hand outstretched as if to shake. “I’m sorry it’s taken so long for this meeting.” She hes
itated a moment, then took Eli’s hand in both of her own. “We don’t get many visitors anymore.”
She turned to Ember and took her hand in that same double-fisted grip. Her fingers were cold.
“Please, won’t you come in. Maudie, fetch some seats for my visitors.”
“Yes, my queen.” Maudie bobbed her head, grinning wide enough to crack her lips again, and backed out of the room.
“Come in, my friends.” The queen stepped back and gestured expansively toward her desk as though she wanted them to sit on the edge of it or something.
Ember glanced at Eli, not sure what to make of this greeting. Frost citizens had been unexpectedly friendly, if sometimes a bit off-putting, but this was something else entirely. Was this really the queen whose supposed magic made everything inside the city possible? Who powered the electricity and grew the food and maintained the force field that held in warmth enough to keep the streets clear of snow and ice? Was this the queen who made her visitors cross a slick glass bridge over a frightening chasm and whose guard demanded in a not-unintimidating voice to know their names and business before going into the palace? Who built a palace of ice butting up against sheer mountain cliffs as though she specifically meant to strike fear and awe into the hearts and minds of those who saw it? This woman, who was now smiling warmly and apologizing for making them wait two days before finally saying hello?
There had been plenty of strangeness in Frost, but this must be the strangest thing of all. The queen, who had done everything in her not-insubstantial power to make it clear she was to be feared and loved like Frost’s own personal deity, who demanded that visitors come to her palace to pay her tribute, should not be such a seemingly polite, hospitable, normal woman.
But when Ember looked at Eli to see what he made of all this, she only saw her own confusion reflected back at her. Clearly, he was just as shaken by the unexpected reality before him as she was.
“You must forgive the mess,” the queen said, turning to her desk and shuffling a couple of papers. Ember hadn’t even noticed the desk or the papers on it — her whole attention was still too caught up on the queen to care about much else. “I think I’ve managed at last to find you both some useful employment.” She glanced back. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, standing out almost disturbingly from her pale skin and blue-painted eyelids.
Maudie came back into the room, a small wooden chair tucked under each of her arms. She set them down just a step in front of the desk.
The queen smiled. “Thank you, Maudie. Please wait outside until you’re summoned again.”
Maudie’s smile somehow, impossibly, widened. “Yes, my queen,” she muttered and then backed out of the room again.
“Please sit,” said the queen.
Eli obeyed, and, after a moment, Ember did, too. What else was there to do? The queen herself rounded her desk and also reclaimed her seat.
They were all quiet. Ember could see Eli struggling to come up with something to say in the strained silence, but it didn’t seem like cracking that silence ought to be their place.
And it only lasted long enough to make it clear that they were, no matter what sort of friendliness the queen projected, at her mercy. She even controlled how strained and awkward the moments of silence in the room were.
“As I was saying,” she began after that too-long moment, “I believe I’ve found useful employment for you both. But first, a few preliminaries. How long are you planning to stay in Frost?”
Ember glanced at Eli again, uncertain of the answer. This trip had been his idea, but they’d never talked about what would happen once they found the city. Given that neither of them had been truly certain that Frost even existed, talking about what they would do once they got there seemed almost irrelevant.
But it suddenly no longer seemed irrelevant. Frost was real, and they were inside it, now in an audience with the queen. What were they planning to do now?
Eli pulled in a breath, long and slow as he thought through his next words. “Well,” he said, his eyes flashing to Ember as though to confirm the truth of his words, “we’re not really sure.”
“So you have no plans to return to Dusk?”
“No. No plans to.”
“Hmm. And what do you want to be doing now that you’re here?”
These were the sorts of questions Ember had expected to come up when they first got into the city. Questions of their plans, their intentions, what they expected to find once they’d come through the wall. To have these questions so delayed was almost disorienting.
Eli didn’t answer. Ember couldn’t help him; she didn’t have any answers to the question either.
The queen picked up a couple of papers and tapped their bottoms against her desk until they all lined up in a neat little pile. “So, let me see if I understand correctly. You traveled across the tundra for days — I know Dusk is many days away on foot — braving Our Mother knows what sort of weather and monsters like my city only has nightmares about, and never once did you stop to consider what you would do once you reached my walls? Is that about right?”
Eli’s head drooped under the sharpness that had entered her tone.
“No,” Ember cut in.
The queen lifted her eyebrows, pulling the blue of her eyelids up so it became visible over her dark eyelashes. “No?”
“The truth is, we weren’t even sure this place was real. We didn’t exactly talk about what we wanted to do once we reached it, but that was only because we were so focused on actually reaching it. And … there were no monsters.”
“None at all?”
Ember shook her head.
“Well.” The queen smiled. “Mother Atalanta smiled kindly on your travels.”
“Mmm.” It wasn’t agreement, but Ember hoped it wouldn’t sound like disagreement, either. Eli had buried almost a tenth of their food for the trip into the snow before eating in the hopes that Atalanta would grant them safe passage. Ember wasn’t sure if those sacrifices had been worth it. True, they’d made it safely, but it wasn’t like anyone had smiled down on them during their travel. The weather had been brutal, especially in the final three days.
“Since you have no plans to leave, I might as well tell you about the work I’ve found. Perhaps once you are contributing members of my city, you’ll feel less inclined to be unsure of how much we value your presence.” She tapped another handful of papers into a neat pile and set them to one side of her desk, then fixed Ember with a long, appreciative look. “I hear you’re good with machines.”
Something sparked in Ember’s thoughts, some small buried hope that she’d had when first seeing the force field and the electric lights of the city. She’d hoped she’d be able to get a glimpse of the machines that made such things possible, a hope that had been extinguished by the strange reaction Felix had when she asked him about the electricity. But now she felt her spine straightening and her expression brightening despite herself.
She kept her response even and careful, however. The last thing she wanted was for the queen to know how much she wanted to see Frost’s machines. “I’ve been tinkering most of my life.”
“She’s being modest,” Eli added. “She’s very good with machines. She has a knack for understanding how things work.”
The queen smiled. “As you might expect of a scientist’s daughter.”
Ember blinked, startled by the words. It was an offhanded comment, not meant to be read into. But Ember couldn’t remember if she’d ever mentioned to anyone in Frost that her father had been a scientist. In fact, she had a very distinct memory of not saying that very thing when Maudie first asked if there was anything she was good at. Because she was pretty sure Maudie had asked her if she was a scientist, and she’d said no, she wasn’t, for the reason that she didn’t really want to think about her father in front of the over-friendly Frost stranger.
“How…?” she started to ask, but then swallowed the rest of the question before she’d made enough noise to bring the queen’
s attention all the way back to her.
Maybe Eli had said something while she was out yesterday. It wasn’t like her father was some kind of secret — the fact that she didn’t want to talk about him had more to do with the pain her memories brought her than because she was embarrassed or ashamed of his profession.
And the queen didn’t seem interested in pursuing that particular conversation — it had been a nothing statement. But it left Ember feeling uneasy, uncertain of what else the queen might know that hadn’t been told to her. She tried to remind herself that she hadn’t done anything wrong, except maybe leaving the apartment yesterday, and she’d only done that because no one had bothered to stop her.
“I was so glad to hear it,” the queen was saying now. “I’m in desperate need of some help. My Envoys have reported some strange malfunctions with my dolls, and I need a scientist to work on them.”
“I’m not a scientist. Not really. I just tinker.”
The queen’s expression fell. Ember could feel Eli’s eyes boring into her temple. Judging her.
Maybe, just this once, it might behoove her to be nice.
“But … I can take a look anyway.”
The queen folded her hands. Her fingers, like her face, were so pale that the network of blue veins under her skin was visible. Her nails were blue. For a moment, Ember wondered if she was in danger of losing her fingers to the cold, but then noticed the faint sparkle in the blue fingernails. She’d painted them that color, probably to match her lips and eyelids. “Well, I would expect nothing less from the daughter of Mikail Dominikovich.”
Chapter Twelve
How did the queen of Frost know the name of Ember’s father?
Ember’s thoughts wouldn’t stop turning, and all of them refused to make any sort of sense. The queen’s attention had turned to Eli, and from the sound of it, the conversation had lost some of the urgency Ember had picked up from the queen. Still, even when she tried to listen to what they were saying, she couldn’t understand more than a few words at a time.